Creators Unchained

Inspiration

On video streaming site such as Youtube or Vimeo, content creators generally have little control over the advertising content displayed on their videos. Streaming sites dictate which ads are displayed, and take a large proportion of the revenue. Many artists on Youtube have recently complained that Youtube has demonetized their videos for unjust reasons. Meanwhile, advertisers find it hard to access content creators that they are willing to sponsor. Both creators and advertisers have trouble locating counterparts that they can trust even though market demand for both groups are high.

We aim to provide an open, decentralized platform for more direct connections to be established between content creators and advertisers, increasing the revenue of content creators and granting advertisers finer control over ad placement and presentation.

What it does

With our service, content creators can register auctions for ad slots in upcoming videos. Advertisers can view, filter and search through auctions, placing bids as they see fit. After an auction deadline, content creators can view advertisers' pitches and bids and select the bid that they prefer.

How we built it

We harnessed the power of Ethereum and smart contracts for this project. Our blockchain backend is built in Solidity on Parity while our frontend is developed with Bootstrap and jQuery.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a seemingly endless pit of issues due to the immaturity of the smart contract development ecosystem. Some significant examples include:

Regressions in the latest release of Parity

Incompatibility between Parity and Firefox

Numerous solc bugs across a variety of versions, including crashing the compiler, code that only works when optimizations are turned on, code which silently fails because a variable was declared as public, and functions which are mysteriously skipped during codegen. In all of these cases the compiler produced no warnings.

Parity database corruption

Broken npm packages

Operating system incompatibilty

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We didn't start coding until about 2 p.m. on Saturday, but here we have already produced a mostly working prototype!

What we learned

Blockchain has great potential that cannot be fully tapped into until the ecosystem matures.

What's next for CreatorsUnchained

We believe that this project has the potential to become a real startup. Next steps would be completing the prototype and approaching content creators and advertisers to get them on board.